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To Float or Not to Float
(or:
How much influence does the operator have on your quality of
cut?)
The best way
to determine if your walking greens mower can “float” is to
weigh the cutting unit only in a variety of “real life”
conditions.
We have chosen four conditions that
should have very little affect on the cutting unit of a “truly
floating” walking greens mower, and found that all brands are
not alike.
We found out some very
interesting information (shown below) after taking some pretty
accurate measurements of the weight of the cutting unit only
for a few different mower models in four different conditions.
Since this was not research
performed to university standards your results may vary
slightly.
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Weight of cutting
units in
various conditions:
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Jacobsen 122F
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Toro Flex
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Deere Contour
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No Operator Influence (hands off)
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102 lbs
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96 lbs
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98 lbs
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Operator hands resting on handle
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102 lbs
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84 lbs
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84 lbs
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Operator lifting up on handle
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102 lbs
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120 lbs
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123 lbs
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Hands off with 10 lbs. in catcher
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105 lbs
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106 lbs
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108 lbs
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Variance (high-to-low)
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3 lbs
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36 lbs
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39 lbs
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The reason some mowers
have such a large variance can be found just by doing the “front
roller lift test”.
Ask
an operator to hold the handle and have someone else lift on the
front roller. If the “front roller lift” can be felt by the
operator then you can be sure that your turf can “feel” the
difference of operator influence from the handle.
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| "Front roller lift test"
on the Jacobsen Eclipse 122F and the Toro Flex 21 |
The Jacobsen Eclipse 122F is truly
a floating walking greens mower because of the way it is
independently attached to the traction unit. The other brands
are attached with pivot points that result in a more direct
influence between the traction unit and the cutting unit.
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| John Deere solid pivot point |
Toro direct linkage |
Jacobsen Eclipse 122F floats
side-to-side and front-to-back.
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| front roller lift |
rear roller lift |
side-to-side lift |
One reason that the “Jake Cuts Better” is
because your height-of-cut bench setting and your actual
performance on the turf is more closely related than it is with
the competition. The other models may tempt you to go with a low
bench setting because their unit is lighter in the “hands off”
position, but as you can see above the operator can influence
the cutting weight by as much as 30% on their machines.
Hopefully you have
found this information to be useful. We welcome you to try this
yourself. Please give us a call to schedule a demonstration of
any of our high quality Jacobsen mowing equipment to see how
engineering
matters more than marketing when it
comes to your turf.
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